Rachel Cusk on Her New Novel, The Bradshaw Variations

An outspoken interview with the controversial British author

Very few contemporary writers elicit such a divisive response as Rachel Cusk. The British, Whitbread Award-winning author has written eight love-them-or-loathe-them books, but it's her memoir, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, that is probably her most controversial. Women respond to her unvarnished account of new motherhood, and the ensuing loss of self, either with gratitude or horror, as evinced by the wildly swinging Amazon reviews.

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Her new novel, The Bradshaw Variations, about a husband and wife who switch roles, he to take on full time childcare, her to work full time, is just out in the U.S. In ELLE's April issue, I wrote an encomium about the Variations, and a defense of her work in general—I think she should be recognized as a major literary force. The following is a lightly polished full transcript of the phone conversation I had with Cusk in order to write the piece, during which she excavated her current state of hostility towards certain groups of women, as well as the childhood dynamics that turned her into a writer of such intrepid honesty.

ELLE: You were born in Canada, right?Rachel Cusk: I was born in Canada, but we left when I was a small baby and moved to L.A. We stayed there until I was eight, then we moved to a village in Suffolk in England. And I went to boarding school, and then I went to university, and that was that. As much as I'd love to be a Canadian female novelist, that's a token piece of nationality, really.

ELLE: And what did your parents do?RC: They left England as newlyweds. They lived in suburban Hertfordshire and I think in 1963 or whenever this was, it was so—I don't think the '60s ever got to Hertfordshire. It was a very dire, postwar-bleak place to live, and they wanted some adventure. My dad started out as an accountant, and he was given a job by a meatpacking firm in Saskatchewan—I think the '60s even more didn't get to Saskatchewan. But eventually he became an entrepreneurial businessperson, and was having a riotous time in Los Angeles by the time we left.

ELLE: So in L.A., you didn't have anything to do with Hollywood?RC: No. But I knew it was there! We were in the hills, and there were big ravines and canyons, and the back of our garden gave away into a huge canyon. We bought the Everly Brothers' house. That was our house. When I say that to people in England, nobody gets it. We had some—I suppose now you'd call them B-list celebrities. William Shatner was our next-door neighbor. That was sort of weird. I've only realized quite recently that that isn't normal. It's a Hollywood thing.

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ELLE: William Shatner's not B-list! Don't say that at a Star Trek convention. [laughs]RC: [laughs] If I had said A-list, you'd have thought I've gone to Star Trek conventions. But no, my parents didn't have any—but I think that they were bathed in the glow. It was an exciting and also deeply violent place to be, at that particular period.

ELLE: You were there in the '70s, right?RC: We arrived in mid-'67, and we left in '75.

ELLE: So that was the Manson era?RC: That happened really close to our house, yeah.

ELLE: Do you remember hearing about it at that age?RC: Yes. And I remember hearing about some other things. You couldn't not. I don't know whether I invented this, but I have a clear memory of when we went to the supermarket, of the walls being papered with pictures of missing people, missing children. I had no fear of darkness—I was frightened of completely real things—like Charles Manson! [laughs] My parents must have tried a bit to conceal it from us. And the culture of school was very different from what I found when we came back to England. That was pretty wild. My teacher was murdered, for instance.

ELLE: How was he murdered?RC: In his apartment. Someone broke in, and cut off the top of his head.

ELLE: A random psychopathic crime?RC: Yeah, I suppose so. I couldn't form that question at age seven. And there was lots of talk of drugs. And my mother, quite rightly I suppose, sentimentalized England. In this environment, England became this amazing, innocent place where people left their door unlocked and it was all Beatrix Potter. For me, that was a very formative experience. Actually, L.A. was a very violent place, but the violence of their homesickness and their creation of home as something absolutely extraordinary—that was much more apparent to me.

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ELLE: But it sounded like you were saying they wanted the fun of L.A—they found it thrilling and wanted it for cultural reasons, not just for work.RC: I think it was very easy for them to see the devil in the life they were living, which was in fact an absolutely irreproachable middle-class family life. But there was a bit of psychedelia in their social circle, and there were people in it wilder than them. And I think my mother's amazingly theatrical, sentimental, Catholic self turned these things into some sort of great devilish satanic temptation that had to be escaped from. And I thought we had to, too. All sorts of things—rampant materialism, children taking possession of their parents' cars and credit cards at the age of 12, and everyone in the shopping mall, all of that stuff. They put it all together in a package. And England was not like that.

ELLE: And that's why they left?RC: Yeah, but I think they regretted it. They never had such fun again. The old world of England was picturesque and safe in a way that L.A. wasn't, but it was so amazingly socially cruel. I had never experienced that in America—never in school, nowhere. Nobody was snobbish and discriminating and cruel in the way that I absolutely apprehended English people as being from the instant we came back.

ELLE: You moved to a tiny village?RC: Yeah, tiny.

ELLE: Was it like the one in The Lucky Ones [Cusk's series of interconnected short stories about intergenerational domestic distress]?RC: Yeah, exactly that. That's the one—the old rectory. Yeah, the old rectory, and the church, and a couple of houses, and the village shop. That's where we moved.

ELLE: Did you feel claustrophobic after living in L.A.?RC: No, I felt amazingly free because I could do what I wanted. I could get on my bike and cycle off and roam around the countryside. In L.A., we could not leave the little precincts of our house and garden. We could never, ever go anywhere on our own. So for me, it was amazing freedom that I could just go sit in a tree in some field for as long as I wanted. And I did do that, in fact. I loved it—I loved the seasons, and the countryside, and the nature.

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ELLE: Was the social cruelty balanced out by the beauty? Were you personally a victim of mean school children?RC: We all were, to begin with, because we all had American accents. My parents, too, were ostracized by the county set. I mean, England has changed a lot since then, but it was very parochial, very inward looking and inexperienced. I didn't quite realize that was what it was about. All these people seemed very superior, and I didn't see them as less than me. I saw them as more than me, I suppose. But no, I suffered from the start and continued to suffer in a way that my siblings didn't. I think they adapted better than me, probably. And then I was sent away to school, which was a real submersion into that element. That became my waking and sleeping environment. So I think I was quite scarred, in fact, by that aspect of England.

ELLE: What school did you get sent to?RC: It was a Catholic convent in Cambridge. It doesn't exist anymore, in fact. It's secular now, they just booted out the nuns. We had nuns.

ELLE: How old were you when your parents sent you there?RC: 11, and I stayed until I was 18.

ELLE: Did you want to go?RC: No, I was miserable, and I begged. It seemed like being on different continents. I lost a lot of contact with my parents and lots of trust in them. Suddenly, they were people who were making these extraordinary decisions that had nothing to do with me, so I definitely see some dark and light on either side of that line [of Parents making unilateral decisions for their children].

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ELLE: Did you come home every weekend, at least?RC: Yeah, it was only 20 miles away from home, the school. But that's what made it worse, because then I had to go back again. I'm not the only one. We were all sent. Even worse, my brother was sent when he was seven. It's very common here for our generation.

ELLE: Can you imagine doing that to your daughters now?RC: No, but my brother sends his daughter. Her school is like a resort hotel. It's completely different. She begs not to come home; she loves her school. I still find it amazing that he would make that decision, though, given our shared past.

ELLE: How many brothers and sisters do you have, and what's your birth order?RC: I'm one of four—two brothers and one sister. I'm second to my sister, me, two younger boys. There are two years between me and my sister, and 18 months between me and the next.

ELLE: So are you guys are all pretty close?RC: Yes, and yet, very different. We're closer now that we're older. When you get sent to different schools, it sends a wrecking ball through the structure of your relationships. We didn't see each other from then—until school holidays. We were away completely, and we didn't really catch up with each other again until we were in our late twenties, early thirties and had children, and suddenly our children were friends and we just started seeing each other again. That's the thing about this school history.

ELLE: Are you the only writer amongst the siblings?RC: Yes, the only artistic person anywhere in my family.

ELLE: When your mother was home in the country all week, did she read novels all the time?RC: I think she spun extraordinary fantasies in her head, and it's that fantasy and life of hers that I would pin down as the source of what I do—my answering decision to set the record straight.

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ELLE: Do you mean sort of narrating her whole life to herself?RC: Yeah.

ELLE: But she never actually wrote that down? RC:: No, but she lived it. And we got to live it, too. It's sort of a heightened form of self-expression.

ELLE: What do you mean you had to live it?RC: She created—she was our whole life, really. Our dad, he gave the stage to her, and she created a very potent atmosphere, and that was what we breathed. I think I lacked the ability to be objective about her. To me, it is an amazing spectacle how all four of us failed to see her for what she is. We were completely flummoxed by her, and I think I had a different perch in the family tree, I had a more observational position because I was ignored a lot, sandwiched between the older child and the first boy. I think I was in a position to absorb it all in a different way. I was also ill as a child. Very chronically asthmatic as a baby.

ELLE: Were you stuck in a room with a ventilator?RC: Yeah, in L.A. Smog and a dog. I was very allergic to dogs. According to my mom, it was smog, not dog. The dog came with us. She wouldn't leave that behind.

ELLE: When you said she created these stories, do you mean that she would, for instance, ascribe motivation to the siblings that maybe weren't the actual motivations, but then that would become what you believed was the truth?RC: No, it was much more her sense of social theater that I sat and listened to for hour after hour, and it was my childhood. If we pleased, we pleased, and if we didn't, we were treated brutally. Her drama was all about herself—her stories where she is the heroine.

ELLE: You mean like in the social scene?RC: Oh, it's everything. Her life was limited. Nothing ever happened, so she had to make it happen, I guess. It was always a pretty small stage, but she had a particular way of visualizing the world by the way that she spoke, and that I found very disturbing, because as I got older I saw more and more that it wasn't reality. And so the desire to say what was true, to get the record straight, was amazingly strong. That was my most powerful motivation as a young person, that desire.

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ELLE: In your books, though, there is a quality of honoring the significance of the narrative of the small, personal life. The idea that even in these small, limited lives, there's a lot of content, of inner life.RC: Well, I have a very, very strong bent toward characterization. That is absolutely right, that's where it comes from. I'm particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it's that area I'm very alive to. And I don't encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that. It's definitely the way you find them. We lived in inappropriate places where I would be miserable and one thing I got was a lot, a lot, a lot of material. To be able to write, I need exposure to those kinds of people.

ELLE: I interpreted it that you were saying that everybody was that type of person.RC: In what book?

ELLE: Except for the last two, I read all your books in six months, so I have a picture of the whole world populated by all your characters, and it's hard to separate between works. But, for instance, in The Bradshaw Variations, the two main characters are sophisticated, they don't seem like self-deluded provincials, yet their own sense of the importance of their small dramas comes through.RC: No, I moved away from that provincial world—you see me in transit. And again, what I did in my actual life is we moved. I got a university teaching job and my life changed a bit, and all of a sudden I wasn't quite so much among the crazies, and that's what colors the things that I write. Suddenly that was my material, a slightly different person with a few brigades thrown in, I guess.

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ELLE: You actually had the experience of going to teach school, being part of the academic world, as Tonie, the heroine in The Bradshaw Variations, does?RC: Yeah, so that's the thing, the last couple of years. At this point, I feel it's a form of social embarrassment how everything I do turns up in my next book. I write "Oh my God, they're all going to think about them." I used to worry about that sort of thing all the time, and now I don't. I'm completely shameless.

ELLE: No one would criticize John Updike for things like that. Or maybe his friends were all mad at him, I don't know.RC: I got sued for libel over [The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, Cusk's memoir about taking her husband and two daughters to Italy for several months, which came out the year before The Bradshaw Variations], and they withdrew the book in England. So the American edition got lawyered to death, but it's a slightly butchered corpse, that one.

ELLE: Which character was angry?RC: It was the English people in the hotel in the tennis chapter, and in fact the wider community. They were all apparently mad. I read something in the paper that they were all up in arms, but no one told me that.

ELLE: And what did you take out about them?RC: Everything.

ELLE: They still came across as not great.RC: It was a lot worse. You feel sorry for them, don't you?

ELLE: No, you read these things as fiction, anyway.RC: But a lot of stuff came out, especially about the husband. They don't choose to have this information about themselves in the public domain. So even if I was there and I saw them—it wasn't allowed.

ELLE: When you were writing it, did you think, "Oh, no, I feel bad"?RC: Yeah, but I thought, "Nobody will ever read it. I'll be fine."

ELLE: Has your family ever gotten mad at you for what you've written?RC: No. Well, yeah. But they never said it was for that. They said it was about other things. What I realized is that people read the wrong things. They see themselves where they are not, and they don't view themselves where they are. Never—well, only once—has someone actually said "I think that's me," and it was.

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ELLE: It would almost be reassuring if they did, in terms of their own self-awareness.RC: People don't tend to—I mean, I take things from one person, and then another person, and I stick them all together.

ELLE: You seem to have a really good sense of working life in The Bradshaw Variations. Have you had that experience?RC: I haven't been anywhere near an office since I was 25, and now I'm 42. So I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs. My brother has an absolutely classical office job. He works in the City in London [the financial district].

ELLE: Why do you leave out the career specifics of job the male hero, Thomas, in The Bradshaw Variations, has before he leaves to be a stay at home father?RC: It didn't crop up because the construction is quite strange, this explanatory space is quite limited, so I found that it didn't occur, but that job is very clear in my mind: a management consultant. Pretty boring. The book was about him not working rather than—and the character saw that it had no particular value. That didn't seem to me what the book was going to be about.

ELLE: I guess you were making a point that it didn't matter what that specific job was because the emotional space of those kinds of high level corporate jobs are the same?RC: Right, and I was interested in the relation to home, how you move from one thing to the other.

ELLE: What university did you teach at?RC: I still do—at Kingston, it's a London university. I live in Brighton, and it's an hour on the train to get there, I only go one day a week.

ELLE: And do you teach writing?RC: Yeah, I really like teaching writing, so that's what I do.

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ELLE: Do you do it part time, so you still have time to write?RC: Yeah, I have to squish it all into one day, so I have one really exhausting day every week where I teach five different classes, and the rest of the time I'm doing different stuff.

ELLE: Did you say when you were at a certain age: I'm going to be a novelist?RC: I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time—I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, Actually, this is a valid pastime. My sister had a job at a literary agency where I would hear of writers who were alive and made money off of writing. But it came to me, rather than the other way around. I had no concept of writing something and sending it out. Ever since very early childhood, that has been my place of safety and the place where I reconcile myself to reality, and I realized that I'm on my own and an individual and I'm not part of a group organism. And that's partly from growing up in a large, domineering family. I needed that from the beginning. I've always had it; my relationship to it is the same as it always was. And I'm very pleased to piss people off or annoy them and occasionally say something they like, but I have no sense of an audience that I'm trying to please. That never relates to my experience in life—that is the only important thing in the transaction.

ELLE: You've never felt, "I want this one to be a bestseller"?RC: Oh I've felt it, but it has no effect on how I write. I write it, and then I think, Oh, wouldn't it be nice if people like this one? I always do think they will, and then people get really—

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ELLE: It does seem that way—that people get really angry.RC: They do, they're furious. And then there are always other nice people who say to me it's because it's true—when it's true, it makes people angry. It's not at all a reflection of what goes on in my personal life. I don't have antagonistic relationships.

ELLE: Did you want to be a feminist writer? Was feminism something you took into account?RC: No, that's not conscious—it's an inseparable part of my identity. I've been roughed up by women about all this motherhood and domesticity business. Most of what I see around me are absolute contrarian feelings and hostility. This is where it [Cusk's feminism] comes unraveled. And this is why...these are the people who are responsible. But it is anger at my own sex, which explains why it annoys female readers—because they feel criticized, and they are criticized. That doesn't come under the heading of feminism to me—it comes under the heading of gender politics. The thread of feminism at this point in my life has gone very fine, and it's quite hard to detect with these issues where feminism passes through them. In the end, I've stuck with female experience. I've sort of had to like it or lump it at this point. But I've been deeply critical of women.

ELLE: People accuse you of having unlikeable characters in Arlington Park [Cusk's previous novel about a group of unhappy housewives in a provincial commuter city outside London]. Do you actually not like them? Do you feel hostile?RC: In life, absolutely I do. I've become hostile to certain kinds of female behavior and female rhetoric that are kind of dishonest and undermining of our sex generally—but it was a really explosive bit of life I was living in that community, and I felt totally invisible as an intellectual , and I suppose that feeling does color the choices I made. [Arlington Park was inspired by time Cusk spent living in a provincial English city.] It is a satirical book in its whole, but I don't feel that's going on, on the level of character. It's not poisoned portraits of particular people. I wanted to understand women very different from myself, I wanted to be them, to inhabit their world, to see if I could understand it.

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ELLE: When you said some women have been really critical of you, is that in a specific place on the web still? I get a hint of it based on what people I know have said about your books and even in the Amazon reviews.RC: It was my motherhood book—the most extraordinary things were written about me, but a lot of it is not on the digital archive, so it's quite hard to find. If you look on a really horrible web site called Mumsnet, you'll find an awful lot of viciousness about me. That's the kind of tone, I think. Accusations that I am very snobby and superior, which I'm perfectly happy to accept. Why not?

ELLE: The reason I asked you about feminism in particular is that a lot of your reviewers apply weirdly sexist, retrograde adjectives that I just don't see used that often, such as "shrill."RC: I get that all the time. I internalize that as part of my interior of shame, but I wouldn't quite be able to name it and detect it as you've just done. Those things definitely get me. They mean to get me, and they do. So that's precisely what feeds my observational world when I'm writing fiction—exactly that school of thought, that air of response, that type of rejection.

ELLE: I find it so disturbing. When I read your books, it's that true escapism of finding points of identification. In life, you're always pretending something else to get by, and in the world of your books you can not have to pretend that. And then to see people respond that way to them, to what seems true to me, it makes me feel really alienated.

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ELLE: Come hang out with me, Miranda!

ELLE: I think there is almost like a kind of playground-mother cutoff. Did you like A Life's Work, or did you not? If you like it, we'll talk, if you didn't, we can't.RC: The thing is, I've always got my sense of literary heritage to fall back on because I know that this kind of treatment has been dished out to writers much greater than me. In fact it does seem to be the more authentic literary form that has excited this kind of sneering, so I'm in good company. It's only sometimes that I think, you know, I've formed such a defensive attitude to precisely what you're talking about that I don't know if I would see true and justified criticism when it came. I don't know that I'll recognize it. That's the fear. I don't want to become twisted in the sense that I can only interpret criticism as being due to people not understanding me or because they're threatened by me as a female person. I never want to explain things like that, and I don't like it when that happens. When other people say that, I don't entirely believe them.

ELLE: It seems it would be very hard to know, since writing is so exposing. Do you have any women who you think of as being your literary predecessors?RC: I think I look for a confirmation of the world, of one's reality. I haven't particularly found that confirmation, an answer more in women than in men. I think for various reasons men have been freer to write, and freer to write freely. So they describe women's lives and the problems in women's lives pretty well. I particularly think this about my female contemporaries. They're so careful about ever mentioning anything to do with their own lives or contemporary female reality.

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ELLE: What about Margaret Drabble? R.C: I've never read her. But I think in the '60s, '70s, '80s there were a lot of people—Doris Lessing, Angela Carter... and now that doesn't happen. I think it's the price of equality, women feeling they can be taken seriously if they walk on their hind legs or whatever that tiresome phrase is [from]. Maybe it's that. It could be that publishing is such a big business that everyone is completely hard-headed. It doesn't take much to see that writing novels about real life—that's not going to get you anywhere! But it's not that bad. I always think that if you were a female painter, you'd feel like a bloody orphan. As a writer, there are still lots and lots of people to go to. Whether you agree with them or not is another thing. But there it is—it's an ancestry.

ELLE: When you were first discovering fiction, were there people who were your go-to salvation?RC: I'm much more dependant and in need of salvation now.

ELLE: Who do you read?RC: I merrily make my way through the canon from start to finish, I guess. I don't read things again. But right now I'm doing a lot of drama, a lot of Chekhov.

ELLE: You have said there are more male authors who you felt you got closer to. Are there any male contemporaries of yours that you like to read?RC: To be honest, I don't read much contemporary stuff. I mean, with a few exceptions. A.L. Kennedy. I can read her—she's very good. I'm sure that there are a lot of novelists. Obviously I read all my students' work. I just read Eugenia Citkowitz, a book called Ether. http://www.amazon.com/Ether-Stories-Novella-Evgenia-Citkowitz/dp/0374298874/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268944637&sr=8-8 That is very much in my area. But you asked about contemporary male writers. I do read new things to give people quotes that go on the back. You want to give people support and encourage them.

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ELLE: Do you read Jonathan Franzen?RC: I did read The Corrections, simply because I read his rather hubristic essay [in Harper's magazine] about how he was going to write this great book, so I read the book.

ELLE: What did you think of it?RC: I thought that it was fine. But it lacks style. It lacks genuine art, to me.

ELLE: Your books are so short. I want them to be longer.RC: It's so hard to write what I write. It's like holding your breath. I would like to write longer books, but I need a different subject. It would need to be something further away from myself. But it's a labor of love. It's a great expenditure of emotion, spirit, soul—everything.

ELLE: People often compare you to Virginia Woolf. To me, you have a similar desire to use language as a thing in itself.RC: Absolutely. But there are lots of differences. My connection to life is much more, well, closer and more troubled. I am trying to work out my own experience in my writing, and that's a very particular thing—it's not a particularly Woolfian thing. That's a perfectly pleasant comparison. I'm not sure. Again, there's a thing about femaleness. Is this the thing that stops me ever getting on her level? Sometimes I think I'm never going to mention the world of womanhood again, and I'm just going to work on my style!

ELLE: It seems like they went together for her.RC: Yeah, yes, I guess so. But I think she was living a very, very protected life, a very static life. I don't think very much changed—her circumstances were basically the same from start to finish, and she had a few things to analyze, and she did analyze. That's what I mean by proximity to life. She wasn't going through massive changes by writing about them.

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ELLE: Right. She didn't have children! Will you speak a little bit more of your feelings of hostility towards the contemporary woman?RC: You're going to make things worse! They'll hate me even more. You described the women in the playground as either on one side or another. To me, the real disenchantment was of feeling there was something reiterative in the female nature—about men too, they must have this feeling about themselves. The idea that you become everything that you wanted to escape from—that seems to be to some people a perfectly normal life cycle. I think it is more dangerous for women than men, to look at themselves and say, "Oh my god, I thought I'd never become this." To me, the return of a woman in her life to the source, to the maternal source—it is much more threatening. There is a choice [that they are making]. And that choice is peculiar and not entirely honest and straightforward.

ELLE: Do you mean there's a choice where you think women won't admit enough where they don't feel maternal?RC: No, it's the decision to turn your back on the possibilities of feminism and to prize the dependence on a man and the creation of children and the material comforts—whatever it is, the reality of home and all of those things, the countless bourgeois ways of being. That is a very clear decision women make. They make it very clearly and are not honest about it.

ELLE: [Spoiler alert: the following questions hint at the final plot twist in Cusk's new novel.] In the Bradshaw Variations, when Tonie concludes that she sort of failed by leaving her child for work, and she has to sacrifice this other professional life she has, do you feel you were condemning her as a character?RC: I was trying to describe the enormous difficulty people have in overcoming gender destiny, and how amazingly difficult it is for a man to feel that it's right being at home looking after children and for a woman to feel it's right for her to basically play second fiddle, not to be the person who is primarily responsible for the children—this deep, deep taboo instilled in people's minds. And for the individual, as much as women try to live the life of feminist possibility, work, and that identity continuing through having children. I think it is very difficult for that to be a genuine feeling. So what I wanted to describe in the book was precisely that—how in fact people can't try to do these things unless deeply, unless absolutely in their heart of hearts they refute the role of mother and father that is so deeply imprinted on their psyche from childhood. It's not easy to do that. That ending is trying to describe how very difficult it is.

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ELLE: But in a sense, wasn't it kind of true that Thomas was in charge and that he did fuck up?RC: Yeah, but my sympathy was with him. I would precisely do that fucking up if that had been myself.

ELLE: But he's a male character, which suggested to me that men weren't as capable of intuitively understanding children's needs.RC: Yeah, but he's been working in an office all these years. I think it's quite a realistic course of events really. I don't think that these things are biological—they have to do with spending two three, four years at home with a baby. You become very fluent in looking after it, and he doesn't have that part. So he can't be expected to be instinctively fluent. I'm not making a point—I don't think it's true of all men. My husband, for example—plenty of men I know have been at home with small children since they were babies. I am that person in our household who is clueless and doesn't know how to look after everybody. I gave up those rights and I gave up that role because I wanted to work and have my family, but I wanted to really work, and I think it's a complicated business.

ELLE: On the one hand, you say it's complicated, and on the other you say you're slightly angry that women make this choice to capitulate as though they don't have a choice.RC: I think the choice itself is made in a less than honest way.

ELLE: You mean in terms of the story we tell ourselves of why we're doing what we're doing?RC: Well no, more because you see it in the way women behave as a group, in the areas of motherhood. They're defending something ferociously. They don't want anyone analyzing the choice – if it wasn't [vexed], no one would care. But having a baby is really difficult. Why would everyone get so angry about that [someone suggesting it's a hard and dissatisfying choice to be the primary caretaker]? Why would they? They wouldn't. The fact is, there's deep denial going on.

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ELLE: I always thought it was because for some people becoming a mother isn't experienced in the same way. It's not hard.RC: Oh, well, that's a much more cultural, intellectual response. There's a lack of sympathy to the girl who was told that it really mattered that she did well in school and went to university and was a scholar and made a lot of money and did good in the world. You know, a lack of sympathy for the difficulty of becoming a mother is absolutely staggering. Of course it's difficult. No one has ever said to her that that's what she should value about herself. And to have yourself taken over by that old version of womanhood when you've made such efforts to be the new version—it's what men would feel if they had babies. And I don't know whether people would be more sympathetic if it was them. So no, I think a lot of that is being generated precisely by this female community because it always seems like the person who finds it difficult is alone, and the people who find it easy are together.

ELLE: Do you think that the women in the non-complainer—"it's all a blessing, I'm just so grateful my children are healthy"—contingent, do you think that is a product of denial?RC: When a woman has a baby and feels violent hatred for it, some women, if they're more educated, if they're able to emotionally, or because of their upbringing, be more honest about that—it's as much a physiological fact as contractions are, or breast feeding, or anything else. Yeah, you have to have it that way, you have to have it as "It's all a gift and marvelous." That is extreme denial and suppression of true feelings. And you can't stop people from suppressing — that mechanism in itself. The honesty of feeling something different is no good. So the kind of feminist trajectory ended at that point.

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ELLE: You mean at the point of divide when you had a child?RC: Yeah, well partly because suddenly you're in contact with a random selection of women rather than the women you've chosen with a like mind. I guess that's part of the problem, that men don't tend to make a past identity for themselves. America is too big to say if it's one thing or the other, but what can be said is that at one point women challenged the culture of femininity and that change has been systematically undone in front of my eyes. I've watched it, and it doesn't surprise me that that much more conservative backsliding goes on all over the place. I think that's a dangerous situation we will all regret, and part of it started with women of my age who are not giving a choice to their daughters, bringing up their daughters in a very feminine culture.

ELLE: You mean the way that now women who you would have thought were your feminist counterparts let their six-year-old daughters get manicures with them?RC: Yeah, and other more normal things too. It is absolutely rife. It's worth making people cross—if I am voraciously critical of the domestic culture of contemporary suburban women, then good. Someone should be. That's what has to happen. Somebody has to say it. I guess that's my position.

ELLE: But it's not just suburban people you want, isn't it also your own?RC: Yeah, that was harder. There has to be another element of stylization in these artistic endeavors. To be able to throw a strong punch, you need stylization about the world you're talking about. In terms of my own world, that's much more unknown to me.

ELLE: Isn't The Bradshaw Variations more close to—RC: Yes, it is.

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ELLE: Did you feel like it was a more sympathetic vision?RC: I think I was all thought out—I do feel like I've given an awful lot to try to express something in this area because it's not everything to me, and there are other things I'm interested in. I mean, I never thought I would become a commentator on having babies. That's the last thing I ever saw myself doing—even talking about it is weird. At the moment, it's not what I'm thinking about—I'm thinking about other stuff. In the end, people are very predictable. This is what people have always been like, and they probably always will be. I think feminism was an amazing political movement. All I can say is my scrutiny of these things has led me to think that female culture is on its return journey to very, very old types of oppression.

ELLE: I felt the end of The Bradshaw Variations—I interpreted it as sort of bleak, but sympathetic.RC: I don't particularly make a judgment at that point. I think it's difficult for people to feel anything other than that. You know, when something goes wrong, there is something deeply violating about transgressing these roles. And particularly the mother, the idea that when something happens to your child, you're not going to consult this sort of culturally centralized image of what a mother is. That is what's so incredibly difficult.

ELLE: Do you feel in your own life that you had a choice? Did you have to fight over your sense of maternal duty to give up your writing? Or was continuing to write your only option?RC: I had to fight a little bit harder to stay with myself as a parent. That was and remains where the efforts go....

ELLE: So in this sense, the idea of women making choices—sometimes I feel like there is no choice.RC: Women are no different from men—it's all conditioning, it's all culturally determined. When a man has a baby, he feels slightly, you know, "Oh god, I'm going to lose—but I've got to do the decent thing and be a good dad." He thinks all sorts of things, but what he doesn't think is, "How am I going to go back to work?" He doesn't think that, nor did I. I don't think I was ever conditioned. I think my mother overlooked me, or something. I didn't have anybody to tell me there were these limitations to being female. I think that truly is the case—a great lack of attention as a child. I just don't think I got programmed in that way.

ELLE: For you to go back to work as a writer, that probably didn't mean you couldn't breastfeed your four-month-old baby for 11 hours straight.RC: True point. And I've always thought that I was fortunate in not having to make the difficult decision, and I do see the most unbelievably difficult decisions. I don't know what I would have done, to be honest.

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